Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers 187
jones_supa writes Now that the PC gaming community has grown very large, it has become only a matter of hours before the copy protection of a major AAA title is cracked and put up for download after its official release, or sometimes, even before. However, it looks like CI Games is having great luck with its recently launched next-gen video game known as Lords of the Fallen, as its PC DRM still remains uncracked now after 3 days of release. The DRM solution that the game uses comes from a copyright protection company known as Denuvo, and it is apparently the same one that has been used in FIFA 15, which is also yet uncracked. While this DRM has kept the game from being pirated until now, it has also been speculated that this solution is supposedly the main cause behind several in-game bugs and crashes that are affecting users' gameplay experience. To improve stability, the developer is working on a patch that is aimed at fixing all performance issues. It remains officially unconfirmed if the new DRM solution is really causing all the glitches.
This is news, how exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is news, how exactly? (Score:5, Informative)
It's interesting you should observe that, because in the end, It's the bottom line that allows game companies to pay their developers to continue to develop more titles, and what the actual customer experience is going to be is a direct reflection of how many titles they actually sold, not necessarily what people think of the experience afterward. Customer experience only impacts them to the extent that it might theoretically influence future purchases from such customers, but as you've observed, DRM isn't particularly harmful to sales in the first place, so any bad customer experience from it isn't actually giving such game companies sufficient disincentive to stop them from continuing to use it.
Re:This is news, how exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
People should just stop buying products from companies that are hostile towards their own customers. If they don't, and they get screwed, part of the blame falls on them for buying from a scumbag company.
Re:This is news, how exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let the market decide. If DRM angers you, don't buy games from companies that use DRM.
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The last game I bought was Diablo 3. it was the first game in years I purchased.
The thing is the number of people who won't buy games is vastly smaller than the people who want to play.
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Sometimes it's better to show them they wasted their time and money trying to implement (or buy from some snake oil salesmen) DRM, that if we want to sample the game, we will. And if it makes a profit, the company is free to make a new level or a sequel or another game entirely. It is also best to remind these people that copyright is a privilege granted by the state. Then let's talk about letting the "market" decide.
The interesting tidbit from the summary is that this DRM is still holding up. I am curious
Re: This is news, how exactly? (Score:1)
"Sample the game", lol. When I download a cracked game it's because I want to play the whole game for free. Let's not pretend it's anything but that.
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Do you speak for everyone in the world? Interesting.
Re: This is news, how exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
i have an artificial ceiling on game prices. i am mentally unable to convince myself a game can be worth more than 9.99 no matter what. and even that is only for an AAA title or good flight simulator. fortunately, i've grown out of impatience long ago and don't mind buying the likes of Crysis 3 a year or 2 after release.
last year I decided to see what this steam thing was and installed it on my linux machine. it was during their christmas game sale. a LOT of slightly dated AAA (windows) games went for 3 - 9.99. now here's the thing. at those prices i bought around 40 games, most of which i later decided i didn't like and only played a few minutes of and some of them i never even installed. and at those prices, i didn't care!
but paying 60+ dollars for a game? simply NEVER GONNA HAPPEN!!! incompatible with a healthy human brain. distributors need to realise that for every sucker who pays, there are 100s willing to pay a sensible price (not steal). and for each of those, there are even more willing to buy it as a hmmm i'll play it when kids grow up for a dollar or two.
Re: This is news, how exactly? (Score:4, Insightful)
The other nice thing about this is that you can game on modest hardware rather than needing bleeding edge, expensive components in your rig.
Re: This is news, how exactly? (Score:2)
Your logic is flawed because the $59.99 price is what enables that AAA title with its 30 million dollar budget to be made in the first place, so that you can later on buy it for $10 when its old as dirt. The days of being able to make a AAA title on a million bucks are long gone. Sure there are some outliers but I bet the majority of those 40 games you bought cost more than 10 million to make.
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Re: This is news, how exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
but paying 60+ dollars for a game? simply NEVER GONNA HAPPEN!!! incompatible with a healthy human brain. distributors need to realise that for every sucker who pays, there are 100s willing to pay a sensible price (not steal). and for each of those, there are even more willing to buy it as a hmmm i'll play it when kids grow up for a dollar or two.
Don't you think that distributors actually have thought this through, and have done a lot of research on price elasticity in games? Why would you assume that people for whom the pricing of games is a multi-million or multi-billion dollar question are totally wrong about optimal pricing, and instead that your own personal price elasticity curve holds true for the population as a whole?
You say that, for every "sucker" who pays $60, there are "100s willing to pay a sensible price." Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies on its first day, in the US and UK, at $60/copy. You really believe that, at $10, it would have sold 650 million copies? That's more than the combined population of those two countries put together.
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Even in Android, the flagship Samsung phone took a five digit bounty just to get root on it...
So, money is the hold up then... eh, makes sense. If you want it cracked, just put up some bucks.
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Non-intrusive DRM isn't that bad, like cd keys, and isn't worth the effort to remove.
I reserve the removals for anything that annoys me or interferes with anything.
And yes, I'm glad there are people out there who crack everything and make the option available for the rest of us.
(B
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This.
Let the market decide. If DRM angers you, don't buy games from companies that use DRM.
The issue with the Religion of the Market is that it's really quite incredible the amount of abuse that people will accept when there's only one source for a product. Or, for that matter, just to get the Low Price Always.
I'd vote for quality of life myself, but the Market is against me.
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Here's an idea, try telling the company directly and politely what your issue is. The best way is with an actual dead tree format old fashioned letter. Yes, a letter. Not email, not twitter, not even a phone call, but
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A stack of a thousand letters holds a thousand times more weight than a thousand emails.
True. Unfortunately, in this day and age anything that will require more than 5 minutes of time and the effort of leaving the chair will be asking too much. By the time you've located an unused stamp (a rarity), you'd probably call it a day.
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Voting with your wallet isn't useless. That money can be used to support different developers, publishers, and industries.
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Great point, except they won't stop buying. We know that and game publishers know that.
Instead of the obvious, impossible option, do we have an alternative suggestion?
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It's not impossible; I don't buy or even play that shit. If people do, that's their own fault.
But I guess hackers take one alternate course of action: Break the DRM. But that still might end up with more people buying the game or noticing it, giving DRM-infested games undeserved attention. Other than that, I have no clue what to do.
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Dragon Age: Origins was excellent and did not feel dumbed down and while Dragon Age II was not the best game in the franchise, it definitely was not dumbed down.
Forza Motor Sports 4 and Forza Motor Sports 5 are both pretty good.
Tekken Tag Tournament 6 is also pretty good.
(I would have included Mass Effect in the lis
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Dragon Age: Origins was excellent and did not feel dumbed down
Yes it did. The interesting strategic combat of BG2:TOB was reduced to pop-a-mole against dull indistinguishable enemies. Fighting was dumbed down to button mashing. It is probably one of the most dumbed down game in history compared to its predecessors. Took me all of about 5 minutes to get bored with it, but I still play BG2:ToB all the way through at least once a year because the combat is just so much fun. Particularly with mods like Sword Coast Strategems that make the enemies smarter.
A true sequel to
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in the end, It's the bottom line that allows game companies to pay their developers to continue to develop more titles, and what the actual customer experience is going to be is a direct reflection of how many titles they actually sold
That's only true in the absence of fraud. And fraud can exist both between seller and buyer, and between employer and employee. EA may not be CA -- EA's CEO hasn't gone to prison yet -- but it's still an outright evil company, abusive of both customers and employees.
If the new DRM doesn't get in the way of gameplay, that's one thing, but if it prevents you (the legitimate customer) from actually playing the game, that's fraud. Sounds like EA has ramped up the mandatory work week from 100 hours to 160 hou
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Incorrect. There are several games released that had NO DRM and have done very well and are very well designed/written/etc..
Are they maximizing profits? nope, but only scumbags care about maximizing profits.
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Are your replying to the right post?
BTW "Profit" is only a bad word if you're a villain in an Ayn Rand novel. Profit just measures the difference between how much X cost to create and delver from how much X was worth to someone - that is, the value created. It's not a bad thing.
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Are you high?
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There are many many highly successful not-for-profit companies. "Profits" are not a requirement for a business.
Most non-profits make a profit on every sale. The word doesn't mean what your think it means.
If you're a small business, and not making a profit, then what? Rather than offering a deal that your customers still find value in, to lots of people, you're stuck helping just a handful. Rather than employing a lot of people, you've only created jobs for a handful. And the first time there's a bump in the road, you're out of business, since you have no warchest. You're not doing right by your employees or you
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Witcher 3 (was released on gog.com), Dreamfall released a couple of weeks ago.
How well they'll do remains to be seen, though.
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I don't known about you but I don't buy ubisoft and EA anymore precisely because of DRM and I am ok with non-intrusive DRM.
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and what the actual customer experience is going to be is a direct reflection of how many titles they actually sold, not necessarily what people think of the experience afterward. Customer experience only impacts them to the extent that it might theoretically influence future purchases from such customers
There is no theory about it.
I bought a game called Armour Geddon. Absolutely awesome game. I had no idea of copy protection or how it may have been implemented, so I put my Armour Geddon disk in the drive. My Amiga tells me the disk is corrupt and would I like to fix it. I now had a disk called Lazarus but no Armor Geddon.
I bought a game called Ultima 5. It required the write-protect tab to be OFF in order to work. possibly for saved games, possibly for some weird copy protection scheme. I am unsure, I was
Makes you wonder... (Score:1)
Why they continue to bother? If DRM is broken so quickly and so easily for the vast majority of games, why would you use it? Especially if it will make the game worse by introducing glitches and annoying performance issues?
P.S. I'd be willing to bet that they crack Lords of the Fallen within the next week.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because publishers care about money. They are the recording industry analogs in the gaming industry. They don't care about the artists (developers) or the art (games).
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So yes, they are analogs to the recording industry. Those legitimate customers who are harmed by the quest to control content distri
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Because publishers care about money.
And yet they are throwing money away on DRM schemes that will be broken.
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ScrewMaster makes my point better than I did. [slashdot.org]
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And yet they are throwing money away on DRM schemes that will be broken.
The idea behind these schemes isn't that nobody in the world will ever, ever be able to make a copy. The idea is that _many_ people will buy the software even when someone is willing to give them an illegal copy, because they don't have easy access to a copy with the broken DRM.
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I guess it targets the very specific group of people who'd burn a copy of the disk from a friend but wouldn't know how to download a torrent or use a crack.
Which is probably not very large these days.
And there's probably some sort of legal advantage to being able to claim they tried protecting it, DMCA and whatnot.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
The way I've heard it told is that companies don't care about having uncrackable DRM. What they want is DRM that won't be cracked during that initial sales rush that comes upon release of a new game. If the game's DRM is cracked a month or more after release that won't impact the sales in the way that having the DRM cracked in the first week would. That's why some companies have even removed DRM from games that have been out for some time. (Admittedly the games were out for years but still.)
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Not really. In fact, most DRM-enabled games are cracked before their official release date - meaning you can pirate and play before it's possible to buy. It's only when a brand new scheme is devised (like this, apparently) that you get any sort of gap between release and piracy. It's an economically unviable situation - as soon as you've released your DRM into the wild it's going to be cracked, and the second time you use it it will be cracked faster. So you have to spend more time developing and testi
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because many game's sales over time tends to look like a logarithmic curve. Sales are stacked at the launch and drop dramatically after that, flattening into a long tail. My guess is they don't care about what happens after a few weeks, so long as they can maximize the profits during the initial sales period.
Still, from my perspective (as a game developer and player), it's not really worth it. Any sort of reasonably effective PC-based DRM is, by nature, going to be intrusive, because it's not built in as a seamless part of the platform (which is why fewer gamers mind the less intrusive DRM of console games or even Steam's DRM, IMO). I'm certainly not planning on releasing my game with any DRM, since I think that's a selling point for many players. Honestly, I'm more interested in the long tail anyhow, since my games have lower up-front development costs than big AAA games.
A DRM-based fight is really a no-win battle in the long run, so it seems pointless to fight such a war in the first place to me, especially 100% of the collateral damage is your paying customers. Just make peace with the fact that some people won't want to pay for the game. Instead, focus on building a community that wants to support your development efforts in order to encourage development of more of the games they like. You know... don't be jerks, don't be greedy, listen to your customers, and build quality products. Radical stuff, I know.
To be honest, one of the things that's baffled me over the years is how entertainment-focused companies and even entire industries can generate such hatred and loathing. You would think it wouldn't be so hard to have a favorable public opinion when your entire business is delivering entertainment products that people willingly spend their discretionary income on.
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Because many game's sales over time tends to look like a logarithmic curve. Sales are stacked at the launch and drop dramatically after that, flattening into a long tail.
Of course.
But does anybody really think there are a millions of people sitting there 3 days after release going "OMG its not cracked yet, and I can't get it for free...you win $publisher$, take my $80!"
I just have a hard time seeing that.
Instead of thinking... well its a single player game anyway*, so I'll play something else for a week or
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Oh, I absolutely agree. I'm not arguing it's a good reason, but I think that's probably the executive's reasoning. Given the fact that, short of requiring persistent online connectivity, there's no real way to make uncrackable DRM that sits entirely on a client's PC, this is the only reasonable explanation I can think of - just to slow down the cracking to make it through that first sales period.
The fact is that there is probably a *percentage* of people who, in the absence of a free version would relucta
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Because making the game is nothing but the annoying step necessary to make you send over your money. Once they have it, why should they give a fuck about your experience?
DRM is supposed to force you to pay to get it. It will keep the worst from happening: You realizing the game sucks before you forked over money.
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because they realize that the bulk of their sales come immediately after release. so if the DRM can hold the line for a few weeks, it's worth the investment. Not saying it's right, but that's the logic.
Aren't the crackers pro-DRM? (Score:1)
I always assumed that the reason most DRM was cracked so quickly was because it was the result of contributions from the game developers. DRM is a marketing technique, not an anti-piracy measure - like all the Apple "leaks". After all, more exposure = more sales. Microsoft has taken the approach for over a decade that it's better for people to use pirated Windows than an alternative OS.
Re:Aren't the crackers pro-DRM? (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft has taken the approach for over a decade that it's better for people to use pirated Windows than an alternative OS.
AFAIK Windows 8's WGA hasn't been cracked yet. We don't have a "Daz Loader" like we have for Windows 7. All the pirate activation solutions for Win8 are some kind of KMS (Key Management Server) running inside virtual machine or a similar workaround solution.
All in all, I would say that these days some really sophisticated copy protections can be engineered, such as WGA or SonyPS3 (which took very long time to crack). Whether this is a good or bad thing, I'm not sure. The times when I have had to activate Microsoft products over phone while entering the long-ass string of numbers using the phone number pad, I would say that it's a bad thing.
Re:Aren't the crackers pro-DRM? (Score:5, Funny)
You're talking about Windows 8 here, my bet is no one had any interest in trying to crack that piece of shit.
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Solutions like PS3 take a long time to crack because boot loader is locked tight. You can't easily bypass it.
On a PC machine with no protected bootloader, there's no way for software to know if machine wants to tamper with it or not when it loads.
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Well, no, not really.
It started with George Hotz's dumps, which was a combination of hardware glitching + program running in OtherOS.
If not the OtherOS, it wouldn't even be possible!!!
Before that PS3 system was very obscure, hence next to nothing was happening.
More to it, dumps, once analyzed, revealed epic mistakes in the encryption scheme (they used a static, instead of random number in crypto), which lead to Sony's private keys becoming public which lead to PS3 being hacked wide open.
However I wouldn't c
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Yes it started with one person's efforts. And that's kind of the point. There really were not a lot of people working on this. ... That was until the Other OS debacle, and then suddenly half the world was looking into trying to maintain the status quo.
I would definitely count on it happening again, providing you give people enough incentive to do it. If games are too expensive of the platform is too restricted or they do some other douchbaggery then I would count on it.
No DRM scheme is perfect as every DRM
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Don't mix consoles with PCs. What makes consoles so much harder to crack is that a good deal of their DRM comes in its hardware. And the tools to analyze and reverse this are far from easy to get and even further from affordable. Not to mention that the number of people who can work with this is far lower than that of people able to run a dasm.
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Interesting, but... (Score:1)
As a long time PC gamer (since the mid 80s) who has never owned a console, I've always bought my games. I LIKE having the box and the CD, and I have no issue paying for something that brings me hours upon hours of ente
Marketing? (Score:1)
Maybe nobody cared enough about the game, and this is just a new way to market the game. Regardless of how the "challenge" goes, they'll get lots of press out of it.
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Even more news (Score:4, Funny)
A title hasn't been cracked for 3 days and made it to slashdot in that time.
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And it hasn't been cracked mainly because crackers usually take a while to crack a new DRM scheme. After it's initially cracked, same scheme applied to other games has severe diminishing returns and is cracked very rapidly.
I bet those games are so boring (Score:5, Insightful)
Only three days? (Score:5, Informative)
Par is actually a few months.
Let me know if this Denuvo DRM remains uncracked for as long as Spiro: Year of the Dragon, which had various traps to detect incomplete cracks, and delay the crackers for the initial wave of sales to be completed.
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Depending where you live, the publisher may have added an arbitrary delay themselves - ie the game is not released yet where you are... Even with a delayed crack, the crack may become available first in some places.
And the few who will buy because a crack isn't available yet could well be outnumbered by the people who decide not to buy as a result of seeing or reading about the game being unstable and/or causing other stability problems outside of the game (eg some drm schemes come with background processes
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Not really an example the average studio can copy. KSP did many things a big studio simply can't or won't do. First and foremost they handed a lot of control over to their player base (when just enough mods the game is little more than the engine behind it). No AAA studio would hand you that kind of control over their game.
Another reason why I prefer Indy games now. They are not only far more inventive, they also offer a lot more joy for the buck. Plus, usually no DRM.
If you ask me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you ask me.... (Score:4, Informative)
I've been out of the scene for a while, but asking around, Denuvo == Sony DADC/SecuROM peeps. It's just the new version of SuckuROM. Yawn.
They're quite proud of how twitchy their protection is. Bugs in this case are indeed often due to the protection hooks and false-positives, but it sounds like this game is also unfinished and buggy. I guess that's one way to complicate testing.
There's a tool ready for DNV, back from FIFA 14 (took almost 2 months for RLD to develop the tools). FIFA 15 is probably just being tested. My guess is that nobody really cares until something major's done, and no, "oh look another football game" isn't major. Then it'll be a race between the big-time groups, but my money's on RLD.
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I'm out of the loop these days, but - seems so, yes. That particular one dates back to... what, Software Heaven in 1987 with Dungeon Master was the first I saw it. Or did someone do that on the C64 before as well?
Everything old is new again. In fact, they're trying even less things than before - which is a good thing overall. I don't want to see virus/bricking payloads ever coming back again, let's hope FTDI and those drivers doesn't start a trend!
Fun thing about bytecodes; did you know you can analyse them
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FIFA 15 would probably qualify as popular enough of a game to warrant one of the decent teams to try their hands on cracking it. However most completely new DRM schemes usually take a while to crack.
Admittedly I have no clue. Sports games were never my thing as a long time PC gamer, but whenever I see friends playing them, it's usually on a console on the couch. I imagine it would feel really weird to play it on PC. It's quite feasible that target audience for FIFA games on PC is tiny.
The reason most games
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Two things were the pr
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MMOs are a terrible example for "DRM-free", they don't have traditional DRM, but they're loaded with the worst in abusive "anti-cheat" software that cripples any advanced input devices you have.
It's also useless (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that bitchy DRM is what you need to make money is silly. The bitchier the DRM, the more it costs you in terms of implementation and support and, guess what, it turns out that a great many of those pirates just won't buy your game, they don't want it for anything more than free.
You can see some good examples in the audio industry, which has some really bitchy DRM. Like take Steinberg Cubase and Cakewalk Sonar. These are two of the long time DAWs, both dating back to the DOS days. Both still make money, both are still in active development. Cubase uses super retarded DRM. A dongle that Steinberg bought and customized (syncrosoft, now called Elicenser) that is checked when you do anything. Seriously like opening menus has checks to the dongle. Sonar has no DRM effectively. You need a serial and an activation code, but the activation code is per serial, not per computer. It is just so you register your product with CW. The serial and code don't change and it doesn't phone home. Yet despite that weak DRM, Sonar continues to be developed and sold.
Or in audio samples. The big name in virtual instruments is Native Instruments, their program Kontakt being the king of sampling. They have some fairly weaksauce DRM on their products. A challenge/response kind of thing that is cracked and pirated versions abound. Despite that, they make lots of money and are the unquestioned top of the sampling game. Then you look at EastWest who uses their own custom software with an iLok dongle because of evil pirates. They are too small for anyone to care about cracking. So no piracy, but they are tiny, a fraction of NI's size and profits.
Really all bitchy DRM does is increase the cost on the developer. You end up spending more programmer time implementing it, more QA time making sure it works, and more support time helping people when it doesn't. There's no good evidence showing it increases sales. Remember that decreasing piracy is not the same as increasing sales. You can drop piracy to zero and yet discover you get little to no extra sales because the people who were pirating were only doing so because it was free, and have no interest in paying for it.
New game consoles (Score:2)
But can you still copy the disk (Score:2)
with the latest parameters for the Super Snapshot V5?
Call to Arms? (Score:3)
3 days you say – oh noes.
Let's add some moral outrage at maybe DRM involved in buggy behavior.
I am against DRM in general, but by the same token I'm not one to encourage other people to break it.
Jones_Supa gets an article posted, but perhaps is really trying to motivate the community to open this cookie-jar for him. Hidden agenda much?
What's the process? (Score:3)
Re:What's the process? (Score:4, Insightful)
Somewhere in the program the validation code will either pass or fail. This is done with a conditional branch instruction in the assembly. Crackers use a debugger to find where this branch is, then change it to an instruction that will always branch to the pass condition.
Of course there are countermeasures used, and sometimes crackers will be able to reverse-engineer the validation check to create a keygen, etc, but the general process is still to disassemble the executable and modify or inspect the validation check.
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I'm curious what happens if there are multiple validations checks and if they don't all have immediate visible consequence. E.g. if some basic function in the game such as moving to the left deteriorates in the minutes or even hours/days after the validation check has failed, or if the failed check forces glitches downstream that make the game unplayable? In other words, how do you know if you have removed the protection (esp. if the game has genuine bugs)?
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Often you don't know until people complain. Loudly.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/... [gamasutra.com]
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One of the most intrusive DRM schemes I've ever seen was in the 90s with one of the 3d modeling programs. I don't think autocad but I the name isn't popping to mind. Anyway, it had a dongle protection and there were innumerable 'propers' of the crack because of how interwoven into the code the protection was, in the most devious possible way: subtle errors in math. For 3d modeling, that meant it would look fine at first but after enough time you'd start to notice vertex drift, and it slowly cascaded int
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One classic method for weak protections like CD keys etc. looks something like this (details can vary heavily based on personal preference though):
1) Deliberately put in a bad key to get an error message like "Sorry, the CD key you entered is invalid. Please check the key and try again.".
2) Find that string in the executable (with e.g. a hex editor) or the in-memory image (with a debugger).
3) Search the executable for pointers to the string (this usually means applying an offset for the base of the executab
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given the digital nature of the products
Man, digital software!?
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"given the digital nature of the products and the constant patching."
Instead of getting close to perfect and then burning a gold master, the intent of physical distribution is getting the data out the door. The code gets patched, often including anti crack checks with bug fixes, and progress backslides.
"Digital nature " most likely refers to the "digital download" nonsense that marketing likes to use. In other wods even the physical medium is treated like a digital download.
What a shame that context is so
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I was being facetious; I'm always annoyed by the use of 'digital to mean 'downloaded'.
Video games have always been digital. Music has been digital since CDs. If you mean downloaded, don't just say digital.
That's really bad for Fifa15 (Score:3)
Because now it's only a game for not the target audience intended (mass market)
- just for the some who bought it because they buy every Fifa game and win the World Championship in under two days, or now the difficulty level will be more hardcore (your team crashed)
- the crackers that have something very interesting to bang their heads on
The game misses marketing effect of a good working crack, that will drive the starting sales, well and what I read strike the good working.
So to conclude, warez and crackz are really a very good marketing strategy. And that game has nothing of it just the drawbacks. I would be interested in a sales graph showing sales of cracked games vs. resilient games. Very Hard DRM seems not to be a good investment, a medium hard cheap DRM is good, because totally without DRM would look like it's worth nothing.
Example for Crackz, Keyz, Warez == good marketing
If Windows 8.1 would be crackable the percentage of Windows7 would have decreased more. Answer yourself how Microsoft gained that WindowsXP dominance ? Well because the marketing guys at MS weren't such lunatics to kill the infamous "MSDN-Gold-Key" in over 7 years of it's existence! And don't tell me that they couldn't they just don't wanted to. But when Vista had adaption problems and win7 was on the verge, they kill the alternative. Fueling the legitimite used Software-License trading (which is legal in the EU).
Re: (Score:2)
" Answer yourself how Microsoft gained that WindowsXP dominance ? Well because the marketing guys at MS weren't such lunatics to kill the infamous "MSDN-Gold-Key" in over 7 years of it's existence! And don't tell me that they couldn't they just don't wanted to"
The MSDN Gold Key was rarely used.
In fact, the VLK from *MY* previous job was one of the more widely-used ones around the globe. Why bother with MSDN when you had a full OEM code that worked across the entire XP line?
Re: (Score:2)
Question:What?
Answer: Drawbacks!
a.)
Good crackz + Good Games -> Free Advertisement == high sales == very good marketing
b.)
Game with strong but volatile DRM -> No free Advertisement + angry customer == low sales == very bad marketing
Got it ?
DRM: A misguided attempt against piracy (Score:1)
It has been cracked (Score:4, Informative)
I just looked online to see if there really was no crack for this title. No interest in playing the game mind you... free or not.
It has been cracked.
What they're saying is that in its cracked form it still has the crashes and bugs that the game has normally. They are suggesting that they are working on a more comprehensive crack that strips out the DRM completely enough that it not only permits game play but also improves it beyond what paying customers enjoy.
Also... nothing new. I've downloaded cracks for a lot of games that I bought because the DRM was so offensive that the only way to enjoy the game was to use the crack to strip the DRM off.
Anywho. DRM defeated. First law of computer security wins again.
Re: (Score:2)
I just messaged some people that are using the crack... it apparently works. There are some bugs but apparently the game just has those bugs regardless.
I don't pirate and hate DRM (Score:2)
Considering that average gamer is 30s-something with plenty of disposable income, why is gaming industry prioritizes stopping pirates over increasing legitimate sales? Even if it was possible to somehow st
Let me know (Score:2)
Re:Let me know (Score:4, Informative)
Let me know when it's on sale for $5 bucks on Steam :).
Actually you can use steamalerts.com [steamalerts.com] for that. It allows you to set an arbitrary price point for a game and when it goes under that, you receive an e-mail notification.
NO MORE DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
I stopped buying DRMed products after purchasing Unreal Tournament 2004 a decade ago. That game had two releases: the normal release (7 CDs) or a special collectors edition that shipped on a DVD and came with a ton of bonuses. This was one of the first big commercial titles to ship on DVD instead, and was supposed to be a super simple install process. The game was supposed to install faster, and no disc swapping during install! Clean and simple, right?
Well, the DRM that existed on the DVD version was absolutely broken. After a few hundred (maybe even a few thousand?) of us went to the Epic forums to bitch about the issue, they finally admitted that the errors occurring during install were related to the DRM, a bug which didn't exist in the CD copy. Yes, that's right. Only those of us that paid the premium to purchase the collectors addition were screwed in our asses due to the DRM.
After a few days, there was no fix, so a buddy of mine brought over a pirated copy he downloaded of the 'net, so I could play the game.
The game was still mass pirated. Those of us who legitimately purchased it were totally screwed over. This really helped the company, so I've yet to purchase any more of their games on disc since then, and never again will.
TPP makes corporations equal to sovereign nations (Score:3, Insightful)
"The TPP would even elevate individual foreign firms to equal status with sovereign nations, empowering them to privately enforce new rights and privileges, provided by the pact, by dragging governments to foreign tribunals to challenge public interest policies that they claim frustrate their expectations." ref [citizen.org]
Bet the developer wishes there was no DRM (Score:2)
Wake Me Up When (Score:2)
They finally figure out how to mitigate aimbots and wall hacks.
Starforce anyone? (Score:2)
History repeats itself. :)
Me, I'm trying to get my games from gog.com